por Juan Pablo Anaya

“Abandoning the politically charged atmosphere of La Borde for the desolate Cévennes region, Deligny and his colleagues continued their singular pursuit of “the network as a mode of being” — one that would be far less concerned with interpreting behavior and experience according to the hidden intentions and secret desires of individual human subjects, and more focused on “tracing” the trajectories, detours, and wander lines that compose a given social milieu. It was here that Deligny consummated his longstanding preoccupation with mapping the gestures, movements, and trajectories of the autistics living within his networks. He first experimented with cartographic tracing in the late-1960s in collaboration with a young militant filmmaker, Jacques Lin, who joined the group’s small desert encampment. Deligny, Lin, and their collaborators began to follow their autistic counterparts as they made their way through the Cévennes’s rocky terrain, making rudimentary line drawings to indicate their direction of movement across the rural encampment and into surrounding wilderness.

The tracings soon became a central aspect of the group’s activities, and the maps grew steadily more detailed and elaborate. They developed visual systems for designating the various sounds and gestures encountered along their pathways, and started to use transparent wax paper to trace the children’s daily routes. No attempt was made to interfere with their movements, or to explain or interpret them. The focus remained on the process of tracing itself. Yet distinct patterns began to emerge: certain trajectories tended to be repeated from one day to the next, and Deligny noted that some of the wandering lines seem to correspond to the conduits of underground waterways.

In his writings, he calls these cartographic trajectories lignes d’erre. This phrase might be translated as “wander lines,” “errant lines,” or “lines of drift” (Burk and Porter tend to go with the first option). The concept of the wander line is the most significant and original contribution of Deligny’s thought: it condenses, in a single stroke, his lifelong pursuit of “draining off stagnant humanisms” by unsettling the primacy of speech. He undertook the process of mapping the lines “in order to make something other than a sign.” Before phrases, words, and letters can form, there must first be lines. Tracing the quotidian trajectories of his autistic collaborators, it seems, was an attempt to return to writing’s origins, before it became codified or standardized, and when it still resembled the outlines of things encountered in moving through the world.

There is another word that Deligny often uses in relationship to mapping the wander lines: vaguer, a verb that shares a root with the French noun for “wave.” (Burk and Porter alternate between translating this word as “wandering” and “drifting.”) Like the French word vague, drift carries with it a sense of the movement of water, as in drifting down a river (a figuration that also recalls Deligny’s comparison of his group’s provisional encampments to rafts afloat on a sea of language). Indeed, Deligny’s language continuously evokes a kind of bodily letting go — an attenuation of subjective agency and conscious intentionality, as when one surrenders to a powerful ocean current. This quality is central to what Deligny is trying to evoke with the lignes d’erre, which seem to register an epistemological slackening of the distinction between the human subject and the nonhuman forces it encounters in a given environment. “The fact that drifting has no predefined object can make one think that the subject, then, is adrift,” he writes. He insists that this is a profound error of attribution, with dire consequences: the notion of the language-grounded human subject — and what he calls its “thought-out-project” — has been a regulative norm that conditions one’s access to social existence. In place of depth-based models of human subjectivity, Deligny offers cartographic surfaces and the hand-drawn lines.”